Apocalypse and Other matters: Questions for Questions

John Francis Crews

Here are my interests as they involve Gibson and his world of the
commodity, technology fetish.

1. Is there any possibility for pleasure in the world of Gibson? What
is ephemeral?

2. What is an apocalypse? Can we define what that might be, as it is
referred to differently in each book?

3. What happens to how social groups evaluate human life? Remember the
various people we meet in the Trilogy... How do we value it? It's
duration? It's persistence?

4. Has the human program subverted evolution? How is technology a
player in the increasingly augmented society of the Sprawl?

5. Connecting Gibson with another author, Frank Herbert of Dune
also envisions a rather large metaphysical universe, populated with similar
analogues- surfers of the conscious and unconscious psyche of the human.
In this universe, humans have expanded their location(s) throughout the
universe, become independent of artificial intelligence, and have
experienced a similar craving for the soul. This is after the butlerian
jihad, a universal rejection of the thinking machines caused by a rebellion
of those AI forms. For any truly esoteric readers, when is Gibson's
jihad coming? In his conception of the world, when will the anxiety of an
increasingly obsolete and limited human body/mind ? That is to say, what
are the conditions, do you think, that will cause humans to recognize their
own limits and react violently? And can we trace sentience or define it
in other than human terms? (Think of the movies Terminator II,
Ghost in the Shell, and the emergent intelligence
Wintermute-Neuromancer).